This collection of excerpts from Russian thinkers aims to demonstrate that the concept of freedom has occupied Russian minds for many centuries. One of contemporary Russia's most innovative publishing houses, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, challenges the trope that Russian history is nothing but a record of oppression and disempowerment. Instead, this volume is “the first attempt to systematically map the Russian discourse on freedom in all its thematic variety and wide temporal scope: from the end of the XVIII century to today” (4).
Tackling “Declarations of Freedom,” the first section opens with an excerpt from Catherine the Great's famous “Instruction” to the Legislative Commission, which followed Baron de Montesquieu in defining freedom as “doing all that the laws allow” and intentionally ignoring the concept of “natural right” (47). Forty years later, Mikhail Speranskii graduated the concept from estate-specific “civic freedom” to “political freedom,” which allowed for popular participation in the empire's political and legislative life (47). Slavophile Konstantin Aksakov argued, on the other hand, that the Russian people preferred apolitical and internal “ethical freedom, the freedom of life and spirit” over the external political variety (48). Nonetheless, he also argued that free speech and the freedom of opinion were essential. Mikhail Bakunin went well beyond internal freedom in arguing that liberty was “the absolute right of all mature men and women… to be guided in their actions only by their own will” (49).
The section about “Orders of Freedom” opens with Lev Tikhomirov's argument that the state is a pre-requisite for the development of the “moral individual's… “rational freedom” because the primitive state of anarchy results in violence and inequality (109). Sergei Witte gave form to abstract debates about state-individual relations in his note to Nicholas II that urged the tsar to approve the famous October Manifesto of 1905. Witte argued that civil rights did not threaten the monarchy and that a constitution would stabilize the relationship between subjects and authorities by institutionalizing the division of powers. Five years later, legal scholar Iurii Gambarov argued that material equality was also an important component of liberty and that freedom for its own sake is not “an absolute good” while governmental authority is not “an absolute evil” (110). The state forces children to receive an education to create free citizens, he argued. Therefore, people need both the “negative” freedom from state interventionism, but also the “positive freedom” of socio-economic rights that enable self-fulfillment. In the wake of the February 1917 revolution, historian Aleksandr Kizevetter encouraged the Russian people to limit their own liberty with the same commitment with which they challenged the power of the dynastic state. “Genuine liberty has boundaries,” he warned (111).
The “Freedom and Liberation” section asks whether these two concepts are equivalent. While Lev Tolstoi's 1905 essay “Liberty and Liberties” argues that only moral freedom is real, Aleksandra Kollontai identifies gender slavery as one of society's greatest ills. One of the less hackneyed selections comes from Ivan Pavlov and Maks Gubergrits, who worked on conditioned reflexes and noticed that some dogs simply refused to be tethered. This inspired them to posit “physiological mechanisms of behavior” behind human conceptions of freedom (175). Written in 1917, their paper, “The Reflex of Freedom,” came at a historical inflection point for Russia, which Vladimir Lenin's “False Speeches about Freedom” made clear with its emphasis on liberty from the “prejudices, weaknesses, [and] prevarications” of political opportunists and centrists (175). The result would be freedom from freedom under the Bolsheviks.
The section titled “The Free Word” begins with an excerpt from Aleksandr Radishchev's Journey from Petersburg to Moscow (1780) in which the author reiterated Immanuel Kant's famous idea Sapere Aude! (Dare to Know!)—an endorsement of the public's free use of reason. Instead of state censorship, which Radishchev believed stunted society's development, he urged the government to let “the court of public opinion” determine what was acceptable (219). Conservative publisher Mikhail Katkov, on the other hand, argued that a free society can only grow within “the fence” of a strong government: “Power is taken away from the strong, and everything that has an enforced character is brought under a single origin Superior to the state” (220). Pavel Miliukov argued that men were not born with inherent rights, which instead resulted from a “most complex and delicate social balance established by the long labors of generations” (221). Therefore, it was not the individual who was the source of rights, but society itself. Boris Kistiakovskii placed the emphasis on outer freedom as a condition for individuals to become internally free. Bringing the conversation up to recent history, historian and philosopher Leonid Batkin reflected during perestroika on the difference between “glasnost” as “the right to say much and about many things” and “free speech” as the ability to “speak without permission” from state or social institutions (222).
The “Burden of Freedom” section begins with Fedor Dostoevskii's “Tale of the Grand Inquisitor” (1880) and its argument that humanity is incapable of carrying the responsibility that comes with free will. Viktor Shklovskii's 1926 essay “On Freedom of Art” adds a comical touch when he argues that writers crave freedom, but when they get it they immediately give it up “to a woman or a publisher” (351). Although freedom is essential for art, “fear and oppression are also necessary” since new works come from the “struggle for a new aesthetic” (352). Zinaida Gippius bemoans the fact that even in immigration, the Russian intelligentsia became confused by its newly found freedom. “To live in freedom means to know how to limit it,” she concluded (352). Both Joseph Brodsky and Yuri Levin argued that the freedom that one earns is better than liberation received from others. In a conference speech in 1991, Levin argued that the hard-won freedom of the 1960s was more genuine than that of the era of perestroika. The section ends with Belarussian writer Svetlana Aleksievich's 2013 reflections bemoaning the materialization and commercialization of freedom for post-Soviet generations.
